Leviathan 2.0, by Julia Allison

For those of you joining us late, Tumblr is bullshit, er, pulled the plug on 5 blogs on its platform based largely or entirely on mocking Julia Allison.* Julia is stoked, according to her email to Gawker:

I haven't asked David to take down any sites in a long time, so I don't know where the impetus for this particular purge came from, but I'm thrilled that he has. I am absolutely in favor of ridding the Tumblr community - and the internet in general - of what one of my readers once called "mind cancer." That sort of nastiness is insidious and it will rot communities unless someone says, "This simply isn't an acceptable way to treat other human beings."

  There is no reason the internet should remain in its current Hobbesian state of nature. Someone needs to begin the long process of setting basic standards of decency online, and I'm proud of David - as a businessman, but also as a friend - that he and his company have the balls to do so."

Up to a point, I am sympathetic to the argument that Mr. Tumblr can decide what people can do on their Tumblr sites. There are, after all, other ways to share your point of view. But what's more disturbing here is a sense of what the Internet is, or ought to be. "Ridding the internet in general of 'mind cancer'"? aka "Supressing objectionable speech across an entire modality of communication?" That sounds un poco facisti, to put it in terms that make it sound nicer than it is. And the internet, now apparently, is where someone has begun "the long process of setting basic standards of decency online," and luckily that person happens to be BFFS with Julia.Thus, this "Hobbesian state of nature," is a state where people who do not approve of Ms. Allison can communicate this sentiment to others.

In Leviathan, Hobbes himself argues that the only way out of  this state of nature that Julia so laments is for a common-wealth to have a centralized sovereign power. An agent I know forwarded me a copy of the new book that outlines just how this deal is gonna go down. Enjoy!

Thanks, as always, to Ms. Pascal for the Peerless Prompt Photoshopping. 

*I did not read any of these regularly, except for Trainwrecks, and generally think that a) it's a job for folks who got stressed out at their last job, which involved shooting fish in a barrel, and b) I'd like to be able to tell my children when they asked me what I did on the internet, that I could say something besides "I mocked a woman whose entire life is a relentless self-parody."

Comments

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Slightly related, to this post and to the blog topic: Have you seen this piece about Yelp? Makes it sound shifty, and adds to one's apprehensions about [scarequote]Web 2.0[/scarequote].

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